It was a gamble that seems to have paid off. American online entertainment giant Netflix commissioned their first ever original series with a Washington adaptation of Lord Dobbs’s classic, House of Cards. According to its star, Kevin Spacey, the show is today the most watched ever on the service. Season one ended on a cliff hanger that promises to deliver still more viewers.
The new House of Cards is sufficiently different from the old to attract a new audience; yet there were enough nods to the original BBC series to keep Westminster loyalists happy. Dobbs, the brains behind Francis Urquhart (who has been renamed Underwood and upgraded from a Tory shireman to a Southern Democrat), is cock-a-hoop, telling Steerpike: ‘I feel like I’ve won 250 gold medals without even breaking a sweat. How lucky is that?’
Dobbs, who is a Thatcher-aide-turned-novelist-turned-Tory-peer, confirmed that season two was on the way; but he was tight lipped on the detail: ‘I would lose very sensitive parts of my anatomy of I were to even hint what happens.
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